Land Design’s fresh approach to a Superfund site brings the prospect of a better future for the residents of Butte, Montana.
By Sarah Chase Shaw
The Silver Bow Creek Conservation Area straddles residential, commercial, and industrial zones in the heart of Butte, Montana. Image courtesy Land Design, Inc.
In November 2018, Stacey Robinson, ASLA, stood up in front of a group of roughly 100 people at the Butte Brewing Company and unveiled a master plan for 160 acres along the upper Silver Bow Creek in Butte, Montana. The Silver Bow Creek Conservation Area Master Plan, designed by the Billings, Montana-based Land Design, Inc., where he is a principal, envisioned a lush greenway corridor through the middle of Butte, its interconnecting trails linking to other trail networks in Butte and beyond, as well as reconstructed creeks flowing into naturalized wetlands and parks, and playgrounds providing ample community gathering spaces. The land on which all this will be built is a designated Superfund site.Continue reading The Heart of the Hill→
A memorial garden for a 12-year-old victim of police violence becomes a springboard for serving generations of children.
By Anjulie Rao / Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA
Volunteers and staff from the Tamir Rice Foundation greet visitors at the garden’s unveiling.
I arrived at the Marion C. Seltzer Elementary School playground around 11:00 a.m., just before the day’s heat peaked. It was a Friday, and students were making the short commute between the elementary school and the Cudell Recreation Center, located just a stone’s throw northwest. A group of toddlers had gathered with their teachers—likely a preschool daycare—along a bench that bordered a butterfly garden.Continue reading The Butterfly Effect→
Prioritizing health and safety helps focus resources and design skills on rural schoolyards.
By Timothy A. Schuler
The redesigned play area at Chiloquin Elementary School serves both students and the greater community. Photo courtesy Trust for Public Land.
Until recently, when the children of Oregon’s Chiloquin Elementary School went to recess, their play equipment consisted of a buckling blacktop, a single slide, a handful of swings, and some old tires. It was so dismal, recalls Art Ochoa, a retired principal who grew up in Chiloquin, that whenever students went on field trips to places like Klamath Falls, “the first thing the kids asked was, ‘Do we get to stop at a park? Can we go play?’”Continue reading Better By A Yard→
ON THE COVER: A model of the Narikala Ridge project in Tbilisi, Georgia, by Ruderal. Photo by Giorgi Kolbaia.
A model of Arsenal Oasis in Tbilisi, Georgia, reveals the roots of Ruderal’s practice. At right, Sarah Cowles, ASLA, (center) at Ruderal’s office with Benjamin Hackenberger and Ana Petriashvili. Photos by Sandro Sulaberidz.
FEATURED STORY: “Range Rover,” by Jessica Bridger. Tbilisi, Georgia, is an unexpected place for a well-established American designer and educator like Sarah Cowles, ASLA, to launch a new practice, but the vibrant city, wild Caucasus Mountains, and go-go business climate suited her. With Russia, China, and western Europe jockeying for ever-bigger infrastructure projects, Georgia, and increasingly, Ruderal, is right in the thick of a global crossroads’s rebirth. Continue reading April 2023: Make It Work→
“It’s a very complicated project, but because of the way we’ve been able to explore it and show people exactly what we mean, I think we’ve been able to take the conversation a lot farther a lot more quickly than we would have been able to in traditional drawings.”
— Liz Wreford
Image courtesy Taylor LaRocque, Public City.
The Winnipeg, Canada-based firm Public City has its office’s 3D printers humming for all its projects, says Liz Wreford, the firm’s cofounder and principal landscape architect. For Thunderhead, the winning competition design for the 2SLGBTQI+ National Monument in Ottawa, the concept was rooted in the prairie landscape and the experience of both dread and celebration that a thunderhead brings.Continue reading Public City’s 3D-Printed Models Illuminate What Drawings Can’t→
The Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape
By Sara Jensen Carr; Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2021; 288 pages, $34.50.
Reviewed by Pollyanna Rhee
In 2016, Karen DeSalvo, the acting assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, noted that public health was in a new era where “one’s zip code is a better indicator of health than genetic code.” DeSalvo’s link between health and place underscored a pervasive and uncomfortable fact about living in the United States today: Racial and class-based segregation is both common and harmful for people’s physical and mental health.Continue reading Book Review: No Green Pill→
Preserving the private gardens of a pioneering landscape architect should have been a breeze.
By Timothy A. Schuler
Many of the landscape features seen in this portrait of Joe and Liz Yamada, from the May 1977 issue of San Diego Magazine, still exist today. Photo by Zenia Cleigh, courtesy Insun Lee and Troy Wu.
When Joseph Yamada and his wife, Elizabeth, died within nine days of each other in May 2020, obituaries and appreciations appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and NPR. Most focused on the couple’s incredible story: Born two days apart in 1930, the two met at age 11 at a Japanese internment camp.
They later attended the same high school, studied together at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved back to San Diego, where Joe Yamada became one of the most celebrated landscape architects of his generation and Liz Yamada was the first Asian faculty member at San Diego High School, later joining her husband’s firm, Wimmer Yamada & Associates, as a partner.Continue reading Honor Roll→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
